The Horror, the Humor

Last year, in honor of the 125th anniversary of its publication and the centenary of it’s author’s death, I decided to reread Heart of Darkness. I went in search of the copy I was sure was buried somewhere in my living-room library. I looked first for a slim binding—coming in at a mere seventy or so pages, Joseph Conrad’s classic is more novella than novel. When that search proved futile, I began to skim my volumes’ spines. At last I found it, buried indeed: in a Norton’s Critical Edition, a tome of more than five hundred pages in which the original text has the feel of an afterthought.